Monday, November 19, 2007

I thought we were a parochial, timid, repressed, subservient, narrow minded people subtly suppressed by both church and state into a kind of numbing grey fog of judgemental apathy. Outside of limited areas of Toronto and Montreal that's the kind of country it was.

Then along came the sixties and Pierre Trudeau and Expo '67 and everything about the place began to change.

Except that there were those among the power elites who thought that the Canadian people were exactly the way they wanted them to be and they didn't like it. They didn't like it at all. They hated and still hate anything to do with the sixties. They loathed and still loathe Pierre Trudeau and anything that can even remotely be thought of as his legacy to the country. And Expo '67 was just one long expensive orgy of permissiveness with far too many foreigners watching.

But change the country did. We became a more heterogeneous country of immigrants than we had been before. We set out deliberately to make the country and ourselves more welcoming and accepting of immigrants from all over the world, not just the British Isles. We started changing in so many ways that eventually where once the people of the US had been considered more socially liberal than we ultra-conservative Canadians we came to now be considered substantially more socially liberal then they.

All the while those power elites who never wanted the country or the Canadian people to change in the first place were biding their time waiting for some kind of political inspiration to come along and bring them their moment.

Their moment has arrived and the Canadian people are beginning the painful reversion to the people they were when I was young, before 1967.

Once again we becoming a parochial, timid, repressed, subservient, narrow minded people subtly suppressed by both church and state into a kind of numbing grey fog of judgemental apathy.

Look around you. Signs of it are everywhere.

Once again, in my 60th year, my opinion of Canada and Canadians is not high.